Solomon’s favorite grandnephew, this one,” she said, patting me on the arm, then standing away, looking at me hard and keeping her smile in place. “Zianno,” she said very slowly, “I couldn’t let these gentlemen leave without having you meet one of them. I know how much you love history in school and, well, I just couldn’t let this moment pass.” She paused again, keeping her smile frozen. “Zianno, I’d like you to meet Frank James.”
I stared back at her and she nodded, assuring me that I’d heard correctly, and in that moment we asked each other silently the same question. did Frank know Solomon had taken Jesse’s stash?
I looked up at the man and he smiled, extending his hand. “Nice to meet you, son,” he said.
We shook hands and I told him it was a real pleasure to meet him because the history books were doing him a disservice and not telling his side.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he said and he glanced at Carolina. “Both sides pay in the end. Besides, son, it’s not history keeping me from talking, it’s the governor of Missouri.”
The other man laughed at that and I sneaked a glance at Carolina. I said, “Mr. James, did you know Solomon? Is that why you’re here?”
He looked down at me and he answered, but as he spoke he continually looked at Carolina. “No, I can’t say I knew the man. I heard his name once or twice, after the war, a card game, I believe, and maybe one other time. later on. No, son, I am here with Mr. Boehm and tomorrow I will fire my pistol to start a horse race. It is the only time the state will permit me to use a firearm.”
Carolina seemed to let out a breath that she’d been holding and thanked both men for coming, especially Mr. James for talking with me. They turned, and as Gideon Boehm led the way out, Frank James paused and spoke back over his shoulder to Carolina privately. “I don’t know how he did it,” he said and he winked at Carolina. “Never have. But I’ll tell you one thing. Jesse would have thought it damn clever.”
We both watched him disappear in the crowd without a word between us.
“Come on,” she said. “This ‘remembering’ is over. Solomon just said good-bye.”
She scanned the crowd and took my hand, weaving through the people until she found Nicholas near the music. Tom Turpin was back on piano and the woman, Yancey, was leaning on his massive shoulder. Carolina whispered something to Nicholas and we moved again, toward the stairs and the alcove with the door. On the way, she found Ciela and told her to clear the kitchen and the smaller rooms graciously. Nicholas was going to announce that it was time for things to wind down. She kept my hand in hers and led me through the door into the little room.
“I call it Georgia’s room,” she said.
It was a kind of office, study, and sanctuary all in one. There was a window in one wall with the curtains open and a beautiful cherry wood desk in front of it and a Tiffany lamp on the corner of the desk. Books in oak shelves lined two other walls from floor to ceiling, and against the wall closest to the door was Georgia’s piano. Outside, I heard Nicholas’s voice above the others, thanking everyone for coming, but now gently encouraging them to leave. Carolina sank into the chair behind the desk. She was completely spent. She looked up at me and in the smallest voice asked, “What will that evil one do with her, Z?” Star had never left her mind.
Just then, there was a light knock on the door, which was still open. It was Scott Joplin.
“Miss Carolina?”
“Yes, Scott. Please, come in.”
He hesitated, then stepped inside. “I don’t want to bother you,” he said, then glanced at me. “I’ve got a favor to ask you, kind of private.”
She saw where he was looking and said, “Don’t worry about Zianno. He’s family. Now, what do you need?”
“Well, I’d like you to keep this for me,” and he handed her a manuscript. It was titled “A Guest of Honor — an Opera.” “It was meant for Lily to sing,” he said. “I just don’t see any reason to pursue it until I know she’s all right. She has that voice, that voice that drips just like honey, and I can’t hear anyone else in the lead role.”
“I know, Scott. I have heard her singing to Star on many occasions. She has a lovely voice.”
“Well, I’d like you to just keep it here with you, then. Safe and secure. And if you hear from Miss Lily, I would be grateful if you’d find me or leave word with my publisher. I want Lily to know how I feel, Miss Carolina. I am serious about this piece and I am serious about her singing it.”
“I will be glad to keep it for you, Scott, and it will stay with me until I hear from Lily or you tell me otherwise. I miss her too. She had a lot of promise. My daughter, Star, she always loved to. she always. she—” Carolina broke down and covered her face with her hands. Scott Joplin asked if she was all right and she nodded behind her hands. He asked if he’d said something wrong and she shook her head. He looked at me for some kind of assistance or explanation. I said, “She’ll be fine, she’s just exhausted. Would you like me to get your bowler?”
He took the cue and turned for the door, saying, “Yes, son, thank you. Young Mitchell Coates will be looking for me.”
Carolina suddenly uncovered her face and looked up. “I like Mitchell,” she said. “I could use someone just like him around here.”
Scott Joplin stopped at the door. “Well, I believe he’s available, Miss Carolina. He’s a hardworking boy, bright, and he might be a good player someday. I will send him by.”
“Thank you, Scott, I mean it. Solomon always believed in you. Always.”
“I know,” he said, “I know.”
I slipped past him into the alcove and reached down for his bowler resting on the bench, and as I grabbed it, another bowler spun through the air and landed on my hand. A much older, nastier, and uniquely familiar bowler.
“Bull’s-eye,” the voice said.
I looked up and he was smiling, almost as brilliant and white a smile as the Fleur-du-Mal, only a thousand times more welcome. Ray Ytuarte. “What’s the matter, Z? It looks like you seen a ghost.”
Behind him stood Owen Bramley with Eder and Nova, who was almost as tall as Ray, only a hundred and ten years younger. Owen Bramley said, “It seems we’ve missed most of the festivities.”
I looked back at him, then over to Ray. I turned and looked at Scott Joplin, then past him to Carolina sunk in the chair behind the desk. I looked behind her through the window past the “Honeycircle” and beyond that to the shadow of a beautiful doubt and the echo of a whispered word, “beloved.”
“Yes,” I said. “You have.”
Twelve hours. It was just twelve hours from the time Ray had tossed his bowler that we were both boarding a train for New Orleans. Yet, in that short span I was witness to something so rare that Eder told me later it had never happened in all her time among the Giza. She had only heard mention of it through her parents in legends and stories from the Time of Ice.
It began with embraces and awkward introductions in the alcove, and Scott Joplin assuming we were family. Then Mitch rounded him up and Ciela cleared the house with shouts of “Out! Out” (in English). Nicholas helped show the last of the stragglers out with the utmost courtesy.
Carolina decided to leave the house as it was and clean up in the morning. She suggested we all gather in the kitchen around the long table, which we did, and Owen Bramley immediately began a long explanation for their late arrival, which was not unusual. Since I had known him, he had never been anywhere at the time he was expected to be there. “When I heard the news from Carolina about Solomon,” he said, “I was damn near inconsolable. However, when she mentioned that you were already in St. Louis”—and he nodded at me—“then I remembered that Ray had asked me to wire him if I ever heard you were back in the States. I had trouble with a man in Boise, but after I told him. ”
As he rambled on, I looked around the room. Ciela was busy at the stove, oblivious to the fact that anything at all was out of the ordinary. Nicholas stayed close to Carolina, first standing, then sitting beside her. He was still sorting through new realities and fears though he was handling it well. Without warning, his world had assumed a missing daughter, a pregnant wife, a dead friend and mentor, and now his kitchen was full of beings out of some fairy tale he might have read to his daughter. He listened to Owen Bramley, but rarely looked at him. In fact, neither of them looked very long or very often at the other, but they were always more than cordial to each other. Owen Bramley mostly paced as he talked, wiping his glasses when he paused. I’m not sure what Nicholas thought of Eder. He might not even have thought of her as Meq, even though he knew she was Nova’s mother. He would have seen a woman, about Carolina’s age, with slightly exotic features, who could easily have been from Spanish Town on
